Anticipate – expect the unexpected – 10 ways to be ‘good-enough’ in a crisis

Residential Child Care isn’t meant to be perfect.

Being ‘good-enough’ is ‘good-enough’!

Group living is a creative endeavour. We co-think, co-create, co-produce every day. We aim to be cooperatively constructive.

We aim to be resilient responsive working for recovery or the recommencement of growth.

The residential task is demanding of everything that you have, mind, body,  emotions.

Sometimes you are not as attuned as you know you need to be. You know there is a gap and space in relationships, you are aware communication is not so smooth and open, it is taking effort.  You have picked yourself up and refocussed. Yet things go wrong no matter the planning. This affects your confidence. Fatigue physically, emotionally and psychologically happens. So too does projection of emotions – are these feelings your feelings?

Projection is not something all residential child care workers get trained to recognise, manage and appropriately respond to yet it is, and recognising other defence mechanisms, essential for the group living ‘toolkit’.

Everyone who works in residential child care will have experienced a situation where nothing is going well. Knowing behaviour is communication, there is something important in the situation to be understood. There is learning here!

Such is our need for a resilient identity the situation sneaks up on us. (It’s behind you!). We did not see it. We had not experienced it.

We are surprised by it happening to me, us, here, now.

Our training and experience tells us we need to respond rather than react. But we can feel we are falling to bits, falling forever, or losing contact with our reasoning. We might feel we are being judged in our hour of need.

We are no good to anyone, including ourselves, in meltdown.

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